The present invention relates generally to information systems, and more particularly, to techniques for integrating various information systems with application servers and application components that they serve.
As more businesses move towards an electronic business (e-business) strategy, integration with existing Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) becomes more important. This means that Businesses with successful e-business strategy need to integrate their existing Enterprise Information Systems with more recently developed applications (e.g., web-based applications). They also need to extend the reach of their existing Enterprise Information Systems to support business-to-business (B2B) transactions.
To achieve these objectives, extensive efforts have recently been made by a number of entities to integrate existing Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) with electronic business (e-business) strategies. One recent development has resulted in the introduction and use of the Java Programming language. Java computing environment provides a platform independent environment that is suitable for integrating various operating system and/or hardware environment. Conventional approaches, however, do not provide a desirable framework for integrating various Enterprise Information Systems that can be adapted. As a result, Enterprise Information Systems vendors and Application Server vendors use non-standard vendor-specific architectures to provide connectivity between application servers and Enterprise Information Systems. This means that an application server may have to interact with various interfaces implemented for different Enterprise Information Systems.
By way of example, an application server typically needs to access an existing database driver in order to access a particular database. Typically, a database driver has been developed for a particular database. This means that database drivers may vary widely form one implementation to another implementation. Moreover, the way an application server should interact with a database driver can vary from implementation to implementation. In other words, the interface between the application server and the database driver is not defined.
As a result, connecting an application server to an information system typically requires a significant amount of time and resources. Similarly, connecting the application server to another database may require more resources and time, and so forth. This approach, however, cannot be used cost effectively to integrate existing Enterprise Information Systems with more recently developed applications (e.g., web-based applications)
Accordingly, techniques for integrating existing Enterprise Information Systems with Application Servers are needed.